Manet's "Espada" and Marcantonio

BEATRICE FARWELL

Department of Art, The University of California at Santa Barbara

ENIGMA is a term not customarily associated with realist painters. Nevertheless, Edouard Manet's Made- moiselle Victorine in the Costume of an Espada ( 862), in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Figure I),1 must be regarded as an enigmatic work. Before a Goyesque backdrop of a bullfighting scene stands the full-length figure ofVictorine Meurend, Manet's favorite model in 1862 and for several years thereafter, dressed in Spanish male costume and posed as though for a photog- rapher. The brilliantly and realistically rendered figure, obviously painted before the model, testifies to Manet's visual sensitivity and manual dexterity, but in its relation to the background scene violates the laws of linear perspective in a manner so obvious as to seem deliberate. Indeed, the artificiality of the whole ar- rangement, noted by critics in 1863 and frequently since, can best be interpreted as the result of a carefully constructed interplay of colors and values, responding more to abstract pictorial exigencies than to the visual experience of spatial relationships. Alternating bands of dark and light in the background serve to silhouette op-

i. C. Sterling and M. M. Salinger, French Paintings, A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, III (New York, 1967) PP. 33-35. Manet made a pencil and wash drawing after the painting (Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, Provi- dence), probably in preparation for an etching (Marcel Guerin, L'Oeuvre grav6 de Manet [Paris, 1944] no. 32), as the composition is reversed (Figure 2). The etching presents the figure facing to the left, as in the painting, though Mile Victorine's eyes no longer look directly at the spectator (Figure 3). Manet's first published port-

posing values in the figure, isolating it in space, and even separating it from the presumed location of the dull- pink cape that the model holds so unprofessionally in her left hand. Color, however, mitigates this effect and shows the light pink in relief against its brown ground, even though the values are nearly identical in a black- and-white reproduction. Frontal lighting as well as silhouetting flattens the figure, and its relation to the background is rendered ambiguous not only by the false perspective, but also by the coinciding outlines of the model's back and the tail of the horse, a feature that paradoxically telescopes the space and affirms the supremacy of the picture plane over space illusion.

These peculiarities of spatial composition are well- known characteristics of Manet's early style. They have been more frequently noted in other works, particular- ly the Dejeuner sur l'Herbe and the Olympia of 1863 in the Louvre, for both of which Victorine Meurend also posed. It is these characteristics that have caused later critics to see Manet as a pioneer of flatness in modern art.2 Manet himself apparently felt by 1864 that he had

folio of etchings came out in October of 1862. The etching after Mlle Victorine was included; therefore, the painting must have been completed by September at the latest. See the unpublished dissertation of Jean Collins Harris, The Graphic Work of Edouard Manet, Radcliffe College, I96I, p. I 14, note 77, cat. no. 35.

2. For a perceptive discussion of Manet's art in relation to traditional perspective and to photography, see Anne Coffin Han- son, Edouard Manet, 1832-i883, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1966, pp. 21-23.

I97

The Metropolitan Museum of Artis collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to

Metropolitan Museum Journalwww.jstor.org

®

-~~~'U

4~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~' - --.;; -j- ' -C-

9iL-IC I

s di. ~~~~~~~~riL~~~~~i~w- .I i

i4- 't -

I~~~~h 1~~~~

I98

J .

,. M: -

??1 . <, .

-- - -7ML

FIGURE 2

Mademoiselle Victorine in the Costume of an Espada, by Edouard Manet. Pencil and wash drawing. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, R.I.

gone too far, or taken the wrong route, with this space- collapsing impulse. After showing a large bullfighting scene in the Salon of that year to an outraged public, he cut the canvas in pieces. The surviving fragments are The Dead Toreador, from the foreground, now in the National Gallery in Washington, and a piece of the background known as Bull-Fight, in the Frick Collec- tion in New York.

It was recognized in Manet's time that The Dead Toreador was derived directly from a North Italian

FIGURE I

Mademoiselle Victorine in the Costume of an Espada, by Edouard Manet. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, the H. O. Havemeyer Collection, 29. I00.53

FIGURE 3 Mademoiselle Victorine in the Costume of an Espada, by Edouard Manet. Etching. The George A. Lucas Collection on permanent loan from The Maryland Institute, The Baltimore Museum of Art

painting of a dead soldier known as Orlando Muerto, which was then in the Pourtales Collection in Paris and attributed to Velazquez, and which is now in the National Gallery in London.3 Olympia's dependence on Titian's Venus of Urbino, though obvious, was missed at the time.4 The derivation of the three princi- pal figures of the Dejeuner sur l'Herbe from a group of river gods in Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving after Raphael's lost Judgment of Paris, though known to Ernest Chesneau in I864, was not widely recognized

3. See Gerald M. Ackerman, "Gr6ome and Manet," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 70 (1967) pp. 163-1 76, for an interesting hypothesis, that this figure may have been derived from Gerome's Death of Caesar. The problem of Manet's relation to academic painters of his time, such as Ger6me, has yet to be investigated.

4. See Theodore Reff, "The Meaning of Manet's Olympia," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 63 (1964) p. 114.

I99

-I--- ~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~- - --~~~~~~~~~ ?- --~_T -?Cr-??;

'

^; . -f

-- -4

i?

I~

FIGURE 4 El animoso moro Gazul es el primero que lance6 toros en regla (The spirited Moor Gazul is the first to spear bulls according to rules), Plate 5 from the Tauromaquia, by Francisco Goya. D. 228 III, ist edition. Etching and aquatint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 2I. 19.5

until Gustav Pauli pointed it out in I9o8.5 On the occasion of the great Manet centennial exhibition in I932, a rash of articles in French periodicals revealed in Manet's early work an unsuspected frequency of borrowings of figures and motifs from paintings by old masters or engravings after them.6 A large enough number of additional examples has been discovered since I932 to make unsafe any assumptions about the "realist" intentions in figural poses and arrangements in any work of Manet before I865, even though he obviously painted them from known models in his

5. Ernest Chesneau, L'Art et les artistes modernes en France et en Angleterre (Paris, I864) p. 9o; Gustav Pauli, "Raffael und Manet," Monatshefte fur Kunstwissenschaft I (I908) p. 53.

6. See Germain Bazin, "Manet et la Tradition," L'Amour de l'art I3 (1932) pp. 153-163; Charles Sterling, "Manet et Rubens," L'Amour de l'art 13 (1932) p. 290; Christian Zervos, "Manet est-il un grand createur?," Cahiers d'art 7 (I932) pp. 295-296, "A propos de Manet," Cahiers d'art 7 (I932) pp. 309-311.

studio. There is a distinct connection between the bor- rowing offigural motifs and the peculiarities of Manet's spatial composition in that they imply a synthesized, and not a visually experienced, whole.

It seems that Mademoiselle Victorine in the Costume of an Espada is another case in point. It has long been known that the bullfighting action in the background is from the group in Plate 5 of the Tauromaquia by Goya (Figure 4), and that the barricade with its figures is freely derived from several other plates in the same series (Figures 5, 6).7 Manet's intense interest at this

7. Goya published his Tauromaquia, a series of 33 plates, in 18 6. The first 12 plates were intended as illustrations for a text by Nicolas Fernandez de Moratin on the origins and evolution of bull- fighting originally published in I777 (cf. Enrique Lafuente Fer- rari, Goya: Gravures et Lithographies, oeuvre complete [Paris, I96I] p. xviii). In adapting the figures from pl. 5, Manet altered the costume of Goya's historical Moorish picador to conform with that of the more contemporary picador seen in later plates, and reversed his action to a left-handed thrust with his back to the spectator.

200

1

I

il

il

I:' i

j..,

f1

.I

- ..

FIGURE 5 Otra locura suya en la misma plaza (Another madness of his in the same bullring), Plate I9 from the Tauromaquia, by Francisco Goya. D. 242 III, ist edition. Etching and aquatint. The Metropolitan Mu- seum ofArt, Rogers Fund, 2I.19.19

FIGURE 6 El esforzado Rendon picando un toro, de cuya suerte muri6 en la plaza de Madrid (The brave Rendon stabbing a bull with the pic, the pass that caused his death in the ring at Madrid), Plate 28 from the Tauromaquia, by Fran- cisco Goya. D. 251 III, ist edition. Etching and aquatint. The Metro- politan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 21.19.28

20I

- -r-'

r J . sie_iR

rISt

i i'tr

:: ii

----c - e=r-'

Ir 1

. Z-- 7 . -- -

.- = - .-: - - - - - --7 -' ,

-

- ia NMK

period not only in Spanish themes but also in the etch- ing technique had led him to Goya's prints, and the Tauromaquia was the series best known outside of Spain at the time.8 Manet only came to know Goya's painting with any intimacy when he visited Spain in 1865. Now, through the recognition of a heretofore un- suspected source, the enigmatic pose of Victorine her- self becomes understandable.

Manet's teacher, Thomas Couture, painter of The Romans of the Decadence, taught his pupils to look to the old masters of the painterly tradition-the Venetians, especially Veronese-to learn what great art is. He also recommended Raphael for "grace."9 Though Manet's idea of"grace" differed substantially from that of his teacher, in the case of the Dejeuner sur l'Herbe he seems to have taken this advice literally. We now find he did the same for our picture, which was painted in the early fall of 1862 when he was also work- ing on the notorious large composition that was to cause such a scandal at the Salon des Refuses the fol- lowing year. I believe it can be postulated that the painter had found access to a group of engravings by Marcantonio, many of them thought to be after lost works of Raphael, and discovered in them a mine of possibilities for figures in his own compositions.10 Con- sidering the many paintings in which he treats his audience to the direct, level gaze of Victorine Meurend, it would be entertaining to imagine, though perhaps impossible to prove, that Manet, fascinated with this aspect of Victorine's presence, looked for old-master poses that could exploit it. He found one such pose for the Dejeuner sur l'Herbe in Marcantonio's river nymph, and another for the picture now under consideration in the engraver's figure of Temperance from a series of allegorical figures representing the theological and cardinal virtues (Figure 7).

It is surprising, considering how well the source for the Dejeuner sur l'Herbe is known, that Marcantonio has been otherwise overlooked as a source for Manet. It has been more usual to seek sources among Venetian, Flemish, Spanish, and Dutch works because of Manet's

FIGURE 7 Temperance, after Raphael, by Marcantonio Raimondi. B. XIV.295.39o. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dick Fund, 26.50.1(72)

8. Lafuente Ferrari, Goya, p. xix. 9. Thomas Couture, Mithode et entretiens d'atelier (Paris, 1868)

pp. 291-293. o1. I have found relationships between prints of Marcantonio

and several early works of Manet besides the present one, and I am currently preparing these findings for publication.

202

stylistic and technical affinity with these schools. But it is precisely the discrepancy between his painterly- realist handling and the artificiality of Victorine's posture that gives to the present painting its enigmatic quality. It is a quality present in many of Manet's early compositions, and one that contributed to the bafflement of his contemporaries when faced with pic- tures they saw as "meaningless."

The monumental work of Adam Bartsch, Le peintre graveur, which attempts to document the entire world of old-master prints, was published in Leipzig between I805 and I854. While Manet was "discovering" Mar- cantonio, the gentleman scholar Henri Delaborde, curator of prints at the Bibliotheque Nationale, was probably already at work on his compilation of Mar- cantonio's oeuvre based on Bartsch, Passavant, and Ottley, with his own additions and emendations. Dela- borde's book was not published until i888. But in 1856 Delaborde reviewed for the Revue des Deux Mondes a recent publication consisting of photographic prints after the engravings of Marcantonio, one of several early attempts to use the new photographic medium for recording works of art.11 Not only do these examples bear out the widespread interest in intaglio art at the time, but they also make it clear that the bulk of Marcantonio's oeuvre was available to Manet in some form or other, very probably within the confines of the Louvre or the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Delaborde lists the Temperance of Figure 7 as be- longing to the first set of Virtues.1" In a second series there is a variation of the figure (Figure 8), in a some- what less attractive pose, but with both arms raised, instead of only one, to hold the bit and bridle that are the traditional attributes of this Virtue. In the first

1. Delaborde first mentioned this photographic record of Marcantonio in "La Gravure en France," Revue des Deux Mondes, April I 5, 1853, p. 294, note I, as the work of a M. Benjamin Deles- sert. His later review of several photographic works, including this one ("La Photographie et la Gravure," Revue des Deux Mondes, April i, 1856, pp. 617-638), is far more extensive. In view of today's universal dependence on photography for recording works of art, it is ironic that Delaborde found this medium inferior to the time-honored hand engraving as a means of reproduction, though his arguments are thoughtful and persuasive in terms of his experience.

12. See Henri Delaborde, Marc-Antoine Raimondi (Paris, i888) p. 187. Delaborde's predecessors attributed the drawings Marcan- tonio must have worked from to Raphael, but Delaborde believed they were made by Giulio Romano or some other pupil of Raphael.

FIGURE 8

Temperance, after Mantegna according to Bartsch, after the School of Raphael according to Delaborde, by Marcantonio Raimondi. B. XIV.286.376. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whittelsey Fund, 49.97.133

203

i~~~~~Cc~~~~~~~=' ''PI',

:I ,

",- ,-L

,

L . -

FIGURE 9

Justice, after Raphael, by Marcantonio Rai- mondi. B. XIV.294.388. Engraving. The Metro- politan Museum of Art, Dick Fund, 26.50. (70)

series there is also a Justice (Figure 9), quite different in pose and movement, but brandishing a large sword in her right hand, while carrying half-hidden in her left the scales of her impartiality. Whether Manet, in seizing upon the essentials of the pose of the first Tem- perance, already saw Victorine as a sword-carrying bullfighter would be difficult to say. His subject certain- ly contradicts the iconography of Temperance, but it should not be forgotten that Manet was an outspoken enemy of historical and allegorical "content" in the old manner, even though he favored postures created under the aegis of the beau ideal. The most probable explanation is that he set out not to paint a bullfighter, but to paint Victorine Meurend in an arresting pose. I suspect it was not lack of interest in the iconographical implications, but rather a sly humor in the spirit of today's pop artists, that produced in his mind the image of a Raphaelesque Victorine in the bullring. It is also conceivable that the Renaissance master's treatment of clinging drapery, reduced to the hard engraved line, was suggestive of male attire, an effect particularly noticeable in the second Temperance, but present in all three of the prints.

Given Manet's engagement with the fashion of espagnolisme at the time, his choice of a subject redolent of Goya has surprised no one. What is surprising is the idea of a lady bullfighter. It would be hard to envisage the russet-haired Victorine as an exotic Spanish maja in a mantilla, and it seems unlikely that Manet ever entertained such an idea for his essentially Parisian model. On the other hand, there is one female bull- fighter in the Goya suite (No. 22, La Pajuelera), though her form there is anything but feminine. Manet had recently painted for Nadar a seductive portrait of the photographer's mistress reclining in a pose recalling Goya's Maja Vestida on a plum-colored Victorian sofa (I862, formerly in the Stephen C. Clark Collection, now in the Yale University Art Gallery, Figure Io). The model, whose name is not known, is dressed in cream-colored satin knee breeches, silk hose, and bolero, her black hair drawn into a plastered Spanish curl before her ear. Her costume, no less enigmatic than Victorine's, could be related to the affectations of the "liberated" Second-Empire female following the example of George Sand and other amazones, but also, and more likely, to what seems to have been a chic flouting of the female image among some members of

204

FIGURE IO

Young Woman Reclining in Spanish Costume, by Edouard Manet. Oil on canvas. Yale University Art Gallery, bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. I903

/ -'

205

the flourishing demimonde of the time by dressing in men's clothes.13 Possibly it could even refer back to Goya's association with the Duchess of Alba, who is said to have affected bullfighters' costume on occasion. These sociological implications of Victorine's role in our picture, however, go too far afield for proper treat- ment in this short study.

Manet kept Spanish costumes and other "props" in his atelier, and it can be seen in the Metropolitan Mu- seum's galleries that the bolero, hat, and headscarf in our picture are the same as those in The Spanish Singer of I860, a picture that won considerable praise and an honorable mention for Manet at the I86I Salon.14 Victorine must have been a sizable girl, as the model for The Spanish Singer needed to roll back the cuffs of the bolero while she did not. The same bolero appears, well-fitted, in the painting of Manet's brother Gustave known as A Young Man in the Costume of a Majo, also in the Metropolitan's Manet gallery. Where a history painter of the time would have used these costumes in some plausible context (as Manet still did in I860), Manet in 1862 used them to present quite frankly his perfectly recognizable and named female model in a scene painted so as to leave no doubt in the viewer's mind of the total artificiality of its construction.

Though he is usually classified as a realist, Manet's interest in depicting "modern life" had only found its first full expression about the time when he painted our

13. See Joanna Richardson, The Courtesans (Cleveland and New York, 1967). Photographs reproduced on pp. o09, I 16, and 2 0o show famous courtesans of the I85os and I86os in male attire.

14. This correspondence was noted in I9Io by Emil Wald- mann. See his "Franzosische Bilder in Amerikanischem Privat- besitz," Kunst und Kiinstler 9 (19Io) p. 134. These costume items, with the singer's guitar, also appear as a still-life painting in the Musee Calvet at Aix-en-Provence. That composition was repeated in an etching intended, but not used, as the frontispiece of the port- folio of etchings Manet brought out in October of 1862.

15. See Nils Gosta Sandblad, Manet: Three Studies in Artistic Conception (Lund, Sweden, 1954) pp. 36-37, and for additional sources for Music in the Tuileries, A. G. Barskaya, "On Sources for the Early Work of Edouard Manet" (in Russian), Works of the National Hermitage 8: Western European Art 3 (Leningrad and Mos- cow, I964) pp. 109-123. On the subject of Manet and popular prints, see Hanson, Manet, especially p. 43; on Courbet in the same connection, Linda Nochlin, "Gustave Courbet's Meeting: A Por- trait of the Artist as a Wandering Jew," Art Bulletin 49 (I967) pp. 209-222.

i6. See Sterling, "Manet et Rubens"; also Barskaya, "Sources," and by the same author, "Edouard Manet's Painting,

picture, in the brilliant Music in the Tuileries of I862, now in the National Gallery, London. Even that work has been shown to be derived in its conception from popular prints of the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, a source of imagery now under intensive investigation by more than one Manet scholar.15 What the painter did with Raphael's river gods in the De- jeuner sur l'Herbe had already been done in other pic- tures, including the one at hand. Similar modernization of old figures occurs in La Nymphe Surprise (Museo de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires) of i86i,16 and in The Old Musician (National Gallery, Washington) of I862.17 An approach to this "method" had already been formulated in still earlier pictures, notably Fishing in Saint-Ouen, near Paris (Metropolitan Museum), of I860/6I,18 though in the earlier cases Manet reversed the chronology: contemporary people appear as old- master figures. Among the last of these is A Boy with a Sword (i86 ) in the Metropolitan Museum, in which Leon Koella-Leenhoff, the son of Manet's future wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, assumes the role of a seventeenth- century Spanish page boy.19 Beginning with La

Nymphe Surprise, old-master figures become modern people. And from that time forward, Manet's method was to pose a model in modern dress or undress in an approximation of the posture of the old-master prototype, while giving the whole picture an increas- ingly "modern" content.20 The culmination of this

'Nymph and Satyr,' on Exhibition in Russia in i86 " (in Russian), Academia Republicii Populare Romine, Omagiu lui George Oprescu cu prilejul implinirii a 80 de ani (Bucharest, I96I). An article I have written on "Manet's La Nymphe" will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Gazette des Beaux Arts.

17. See Alain de Leiris, "Manet, Geroult and Chrysyppos," Art Bulletin 46 (i 964) pp. 40 -404.

i8. See Bazin, "Manet et la Tradition," pp. I53-155. 19. Sterling and Salinger, French Paintings, III, p. 31, relate this

painting to a work ofRibera. I believe it is also related to two early paintings by Manet, The Spanish Cavaliers (Musee des Beaux- Arts, Lyons) and Scene in a Spanish Studio (Galerie Lorenceau, Paris), both of I860. In the first, Leon Koella-Leenhoff appears as a page carrying a tray. The second has evidently been cut down, since part of a similar page boy appears at the left. He may have been carrying a tray like the first, or possibly the sword of one of the visitors, and may be presumed to have represented Leon Koella- Leenhoff also. See color reproduction in Hanson, Manet, frontis- piece.

20. Nils Gosta Sandblad, Three Studies, p. 97, says of this de- velopment: "Manet, who, in his figure-compositions from around I860, had still accepted the recognized subjects, even when he

206

trend is the great Olympia of 1863, as unabashedly dis- playing her source in Titian as she does her "modern" and realistically painted body.

The beau idial is nowhere better demonstrated to be a departure from reality than in Manet's attempt to put a live human being into an idealized posture. The anatomically impossible stance of Marcantonio's Tem- perance requires the body to face in three different directions at once and to stand with both feet on the same groundline. Its fluid and graceful movement, enhanced by curving drapery, is immobilized and rendered less graceful by the nearest approximation Victorine could assume in her harshly silhouetted costume. For Temperance's bridle, Manet substituted the improbable cape, permitting its fall to provide some slight movement to mitigate the figure's relative im- mobility; perhaps he also saw in the flying folds of the scarf on her head a modern analogy to the wavy, flying locks of Marcantonio's elegant personification. Vic- torine's bland, individualized features assume a strangely new meaning in view of the prototype. One could almost believe that Manet took a dare from an artist or poet friend in creating this image: modern, chic, unlovely, enigmatic, and in the end poetic in its Baudelairean mysteriousness. It was during 1862 that Manet's friendship with the great poet was most intimate.

The discrepancy between the enigmatic quality of Manet's imagery and the realism of its execution has always been disconcerting to his critics, especially those who have seen in his art little more than a tran- sition from realism to impressionism. To be sure, the living model was the heroine in his art, and it was the visual presence of the living model from which his inspiration as a painter sprang. It is in this that he was

made fun of their time-honoured conventions, had displayed, in his general approach to a new realism in I862, a tendency similar to Vermeer, to resolve the conventions into charades. For example, he painted Victorine Meurend and his brother Eugene [sic] as Spaniards, but allowed them to keep their own identities, and even drew attention, in his titles, to the fact that these were costume- pieces."

a realist, more than in his subject matter or his method of composition, and it is this that he had in common with the younger impressionist generation, who under- stood best this particular element in his art. Spots of color, judiciously chosen and cunningly applied, form an equivalent of direct visual experience. The impres- sionists, however, applied this method to the entire composition of their canvases. Manet did not, until later in his career, and even then only in a qualified manner. His schooling was with the old masters, and he synthesized his compositions as they had done before him.

It has been fashionable since the 930os to claim that Manet lacked imagination and therefore leaned on others for his pictorial ideas.21 The undeniable power and astringent freshness of his work had to be acknowl- edged, however, and to explain that power, critics have traditionally relied on the facility and the felicity with which Manet, a painter's painter, chose his colors and applied his paint. Much the same could be said for John Singer Sargent. But who would place these two at the same level of artistic achievement? It took thought, imagination, wit, and courage to risk a paint- ing such as this one, and though it is less well known, I do not hesitate to place it in the same category of achievement as the Dejeuner sur l'Herbe and the Olympia. Like them, once seen, it is unforgettable.

It was Degas who said to Daniel Halevy in I912, "Oh, literature-writers-no, what's underneath is no one's business. There must be a certain mystery. Works of art must be left with some mystery about them."21 I submit in justification of this study that Manet's poetry remains mysterious enough to withstand all scholarly onslaughts and is just as pleasurable now as it was before the discovery of its source, if not more so.

2I. This attitude is to be found in Jacques-Emile Blanche, Manet (London, 1925); Paul Colin, Manet (Paris, 1937); Michel Florisoone, Manet (Monaco, 1947); and Zervos, "Manet createur" and "A propos de Manet."

22. Quoted in Daniel Halevy, My Friend Degas, trans. and ed. Mina Curtiss (Middletown, Conn., I964) p. 109.

207